Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

231 Pages·2018·2.65 MB·English

by  Alice Robb

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction
How We Forgot About Dreams
The Vanguard
Dreams Enter the Lab
The Renaissance of Sleep Research
Problem-Solving
Preparation for Life
Nightmares
Diagnosis
Dream Groups
Control
Epilogue: My Night Life
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2018 by Alice Robb
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
[email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park
Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhco.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-544-93121-3
Cover design by Brian Moore Cover image © Shutterstock
Author photograph © Don Razniewski Photography eISBN 978-0-544-93210-4
v1.1018
I understand why most people regard their dreams as of little
importance. They are too light for them, and most people identify the
serious with what has weight. Tears are serious; one can collect them in
a jar. But a dream, like a smile, is pure air. Dreams, like smiles, fade
rapidly.
But what if the face faded away, and the smile remained?

—Susan Sontag, The Benefactor
INTRODUCTION
I
2011
SPENT THE SUMMER OF DIGGING HOLES AND TALKING ABOUT
my dreams. Within two weeks, I had blown through the novels I’d taken to the
remote Andean village of Nepeña, where I was excavating Moche remains with
my classmates and a Peruvian professor. I’d saved most of my suitcase for bulky
rain gear and emergency jars of peanut butter; I hadn’t anticipated how much
time I’d have when my internet access was subject to the whims of an erratic
café owner. So when my friend James passed me a beat-up paperback whose
cover showed a man’s brain being penetrated by a ray of sunlight and a puff of
clouds, I willed myself to set my skepticism aside.
As I scanned the table of contents, though, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at
chapter titles like “Life Is a Dream” and “Rehearsal for Living.” I cringed at the
list of exercises: the eerie-sounding “twin bodies technique,” the ludicrous
“dream lotus and flame technique,” the ominous “no body technique.” Stephen
LaBerge’s Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming had all the trappings of a
New Age self-help screed, but with the closest English-language bookstore a six-
hour bus ride away, I started to read.
“Proverbially, and undeniably, life is short,” LaBerge wrote. “To make
matters worse, we must spend between a quarter and a half of our lives asleep.
Most of us are in the habit of virtually sleepwalking through our dreams. We
sleep, mindlessly, through many thousands of opportunities to be fully aware
and alive.” In what LaBerge called “lucid dreams,” a sleeping person could
become aware that she was dreaming and—with a little practice—control the
plot of the dream. I was hooked.
Most people experience a lucid dream at some point in their lives, but only
about 10 to 20 percent have them regularly. For some in that minority, lucid
dreaming is so pleasurable that it becomes a hobby or a kind of self-help. Lucid
dreams can seem more vivid than reality; they can provide a high as intense as
psychedelics and even deliver sexual gratification. (One psychologist claimed to
reach orgasm in one-third of her lucid dreams, and measures of vaginal pulse
amplitude have shown that women’s dream orgasms correspond to real
physiological changes.) Others use lucid dreaming to take control of nightmares
or rehearse difficult real-life situations. Of all my memories of that summer in
Peru—drinking pisco in the desert, finding a mummified baby, unwrapping it
under less-than-scientifically-optimal conditions—the one that stands out most is
the memory of my first lucid dream.
At nine o’clock, I climbed into the bottom bunk and curled up in my sleeping
bag, worn out from physical exertion and the monotony of digging. I set my
alarm for five A.M. and drifted off almost immediately, my body too tired to let
my mind wander down its usual anxiety-laden paths. And then, the scene
changed. It was a summer afternoon—not the Andean summer, with its thin
warmth and cloudy nights, but a real summer, the kind of heat so extravagant
you jump in the water and dry off in the sun. I soaked up the warmth I’d been
craving, treading water in some bucolic pool I’d never seen before. I don’t
particularly like swimming in real life; I don’t like exercising in any form
without the distraction of podcasts or Pandora. But this was different—effortless
and sensual. I had a heightened awareness of every part of my body, the
physicality of the cool water and the bright air and a surreal forest enclosing the
pool in magnificent foliage. I woke up euphoric.
The memory had none of the haziness that usually clouds dreams, and the
details remain perfectly crisp years later. But I wasn’t just elated; the whole
thing was also vaguely disturbing. I hadn’t been in my sleeping bag in a dusty
dormitory in Peru—I had been transported to some faraway place, and I
preferred it there. My jaunt in the pool had shaken my sense of what was real,
and I couldn’t explain it without sounding crazy. All I knew was that I wanted to
do it again.
James and I spent the rest of the summer practicing LaBerge’s tips. We
recounted our previous night’s dreams while we scratched the grime off ancient
pots. We repeated LaBerge’s mantra ad nauseam: “Tonight, I will have a lucid
dream.” We made up mantras of our own: “Tonight, I will fly to the moon.” We
learned to recognize the signs that we were dreaming, like finding ourselves
flying or meeting dead people. Every couple of hours, we would do what
LaBerge called a reality test, asking ourselves if we were awake or asleep—a
trick that, once ingrained, LaBerge promised would trigger lucidity.
The bar for what constitutes good conversation may be lower when you spend
most of your time scraping the sand with a trowel, but even after I left Peru, even
when I had more than four people to talk to, high-speed WiFi, and whole
libraries full of books, I couldn’t stop thinking about dreams. They were so
much fuller, so much more mysterious than I had ever imagined.
I began keeping a dream diary, carefully logging whatever I could remember
of my dreams in a spiral-bound leather notebook each morning; I had read that it
was important to record something every day, no matter how fragmented or
boring. The results were almost immediate. Within weeks, the entries in my
journal went from a dutiful No recollection or brief, tentative snippets (I am
watching the Nutcracker? There is a spider?) to two or three long, convoluted
narratives almost every night. My new night life was every bit as active—and at
least as entertaining—as my waking hours, and I was stunned: I understood that
I had been having dreams like this all my life, but I had been promptly forgetting
them, letting them fade away as though they had never happened. What
adventures had I gone on and then forgotten? What opportunities—to gain new
insight or just to take a break from reality—had I missed?
Most new skills—especially those that promise to change how you experience
the world—are difficult to learn. Mastering a new language takes years of
concentrated study. Meditating requires patience and frequent, sometimes
frustrating practice. Gains are incremental, often imperceptible. But improving
your dream life can be as simple as increasing the time you devote to thinking
about dreams from none at all to a minute or two each day, sparing a pre-bed
thought for your intention to remember your dreams or taking a moment to write
them down or speak them into your smartphone in the morning. The process is
painless; the progress is swift. And the payoff is life-changing. Becoming aware
of your dreams is like dipping into a well of otherwise inaccessible fantasies and
fears, signs from our subconscious and creative solutions to projects and
problems.

IN RECENT YEARS, scientists have discovered how we can improve our dream
recall and harness the power of dreams in a systematic fashion. But humans have
been wondering about their dreams for millennia. Some scholars believe that our
ancestors’ earliest artwork—cave paintings—were inspired by their makers’
nighttime visions. Dream diaries are among the oldest examples of literature;
they have been found in the remains of ancient Greece and medieval Japan.
We live in a world built on dreams. Throughout history and around the globe,
dreams have been a source of endless fascination and guidance. We have looked
at dreams as prophecies of the future and vestiges of the past, as messages from
the divine and from within our own psyches. Dreams allow us to experience
things we’ve lost and things we’ve never had. In dreams, the paralyzed can
move; the blind can see. Doctors have used dreams as a tool in diagnosis; artists
have relied on them for inspiration. The dying take comfort in vivid dreams of
the past, dreams that blur the boundaries of consciousness and call reality into
question. Politicians and mythical heroes have looked to dreams to make
decisions and invoked them to justify war. Leaders have used them for good
(when Gandhi argued against the constriction of Indians’ civil liberties in 1919,
he said he had dreamed that the country would observe a strike) and for evil
(videotapes released after the September 11 attacks show Osama bin Laden and
his followers swapping dreams of pilots, planes, and crashing buildings). Even
for the less than 3 percent of the population who claim never to remember their
dreams, it is still important to understand them as a potent, overlooked force
behind famous works of art, religious conversions, and political events.
Our contemporary neglect of our dream lives is not only a historical anomaly
but a particular paradox in our current culture. People are obsessed with hearing
the latest research on sleep, even if scientists haven’t yet reached a consensus on
why we pass out every night. We want to know how screens and modern
scheduling affect our sleep patterns. We click on studies warning us that
anything less than eight hours of sleep destroys our health, looks, and happiness
—or promising that six hours is enough or that some people are fine with just
three or four.
Meanwhile, we chart, track, and optimize our time, buying Fitbits and phone
apps to count the minutes spent on exercise, work, and hobbies; we suffer from
“fear of missing out.” Yet in ignoring our dreams, we squander an opportunity to
experience adventure and boost our mental health, about five or six years’ worth
of opportunity (20 to 25 percent of total time asleep) over the course of an
average lifetime. Sleep is usually discussed as a means to an end—a tool to
ensure the daytime is productive, to improve memory, regulate metabolism, and
keep the immune system in order. But as LaBerge asked: “If you must sleep
through a third of your life, as it seems you must, are you willing to sleep
through your dreams too?”
Until recently, there was no such thing as a science of dreams. For reasons
both practical and philosophical, the mysteries of dreaming were relegated to the
realms of magic and religion. Dreams don’t easily lend themselves to the lab;
they are difficult to report in full, and, although a new Japanese scanning device
may be able to “read” certain dream motifs, they remain impossible to verify.
And the scientists who have chosen to follow their interest in dreams have not
always been the kind of strait-laced ambassadors who could have best served the
cause. The subject has attracted more than its share of brilliant oddballs—
awkward obsessives willing to stake their careers on a puzzle they were unlikely
to ever crack. But if the heroes of this story have sometimes strayed outside the
bounds of scientific orthodoxy—designing doomed experiments on the
telepathic nature of dreams, insisting that dreams could predict the future,
conflating their own intuition with evidence—their open-mindedness has also
helped them recognize surprising truths. I’ve come to appreciate how blurry that
line can be—how legitimate scientists can entertain improbable ideas and how
good ideas can come from unlikely places. Against the advice of some of her
colleagues, Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett accepted a paper on
extrasensory perception for the academic journal she edits, Dreaming. “My